A novel passive polymer-sorbent thermal battery for low-temperature energy applications: A numerical feasibility study

Abstract

Sorption thermal energy storage (STES) systems offer great potential for meeting the growing energy needs and increasing the use of renewable energy resources. However, the complexity and large-scale of current STES technologies lead to relatively low-efficiency systems, severely limiting their widespread implementation. To address this challenge, this study presents a novel and compact smart-polymer sorbent (SPS) thermal battery with passive material-enabled mechanisms for controlled low-temperature thermal energy storage applications. A numerical model is established to investigate the coupled heat and mass transport processes underlying the working behavior of the SPS battery. It is also used to reveal the interdependence of the two processes and the limiting factors for the battery's thermal performance. The heating performance of several SPS battery designs was studied as an example, focusing on their application for cold environment thermal protection. Moreover, the influence of various design parameters was examined, including sorbent selection, void fraction, relative humidity, gate thickness, and gate-to-sorbent area, along with their implications to the coupled mass-heat transport processes. The results revealed that diffusion-based mass transport is the limiting process affecting the SPS battery thermal performance. The numerical simulation results also indicated that the sorbent selection should consider their low recharge temperature (40 °C–100 °C) and less pronounced temperature-dependent adsorption behavior to maximize the heating performance of the SPS battery. In addition, the SPS battery heating efficiency could be enhanced by increasing the sorbent void fraction to 0.35, relative humidity (RH) to 40 %, and gate-to-sorbent area to 60 % while decreasing the gate thickness to 0.1 μm effectively, which facilitate the diffusion-controlled mass transport process. Lastly, a single layer SPS battery is beneficial for thermal regulation at low temperatures; however, using distributed battery designs had a significant thermal performance enhancement benefit of 90 % compared to the single layer design. Hence, our study reveals the complex coupling effects of the heat and mass transport processes within the proposed SPS battery and provides insights and guidance (e.g., materials selections and SPS design) for engineering emergent small-scale passive STES applications.